The More Prosperous And Settled A Nation,

We Are A People Captivated By The Power And Romance Of Metaphor, Forever Seeking The Invisible Through The Image Of The Visible.

Tardiness Is Next To Wickedness In A Society Relentless In Its Consumption Of Time As Both A Good And A Service--as Tweet And Instagram, Film Clip And Sound Bite, As Sporting Event, Investment Opportunity, Tinder Hookup, And Interest Rate--its Value Measured Not By Its Texture Or Its Substance But By The Speed Of Its Delivery, A Distinction Apparent To Andy Warhol When He Supposedly Said That Any Painting That Takes Longer Than Five Minutes To Make Is A Bad Painting.

It Is No Accident That Banks Resemble Temples, Preferably Greek, And That The Supplicants Who Come To Perform The Rites Of Deposit And Withdrawal Instinctively Lower Their Voices Into The Registers Of Awe. Even The Most Junior Tellers Acquire Within Weeks Of Their Employment The Officiousness Of Hierophants Tending An Eternal Flame.

Usually When I Drank Too Much, I Could Guess Why I Did So, The Objective Being To Murder A State Of Consciousness That I Didn't Have The Courage To Sustain--a Fear Of Heights, Which Sometimes During The Carnival Of The 1960s Accompanied My Attempts To Transform The Bourgeois Journalist Into An Avant-garde Novelist. The Stepped-up Ambition Was A Commonplace Among The Would-be William Faulkners Of My Generation; Nearly Always It Resulted In Commercial Failure And Literary Embarrassment.

Label Celebrity A Consumer Society's Most Precious Consumer Product, And Eventually It Becomes The Hero With A Thousand Faces, The Packaging Of The Society's Art And Politics, The Framework Of Its Commerce, And The Stuff Of Its Religion.